You can do much better - Engineer Unicard Employee Review

The business has been badly mismanaged of late, while there may be an opportunity for exposure to some interesting tech, you will likely be so bogged down firefighting that your opportunities to actually learn will be limited. You are better than this, this is unlikely to be the job you are looking for. They will pay you below industry standard for your skills, offer no real benefits and very little flexibility and, if you survive redundancy for long enough, you will leave, broken and demoralised. CEO treats employees with absolute contempt, an inconvenience to be vaguely tolerated only if absolutely necessary. • After taking over the ecebs business and providing categorical promises that the Unicard management team knew exactly what they were doing, could afford the commitment, and could grow the company, proceeded to immediately cut all benefits and tear up staff terms and conditions. • The CEO openly attacked his new employees in the ecebs business in an all-hands meeting, deriding anonymous questions we had raised and calling one question about the financial state of the company arrogant and ignorant. • After employees forced their hands into a consultation, we could see that the CEO had little intention of making this a genuine, meaningful process, at one formal meeting he went as far as actually calling it “an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction”, apparently not even aware that this was saying the quiet bit out loud. • There were no meaningful concessions from the consultation process, not even around some simple, no cost measures which would have gone a good way to appeasing some of the discontent and ill feeling from the staff. • With discontent in the workforce, Mr Dickinson’s considered approach was to tell us all that if we didn’t like it, we should leave, he’d bring in people who wanted to be there. The company adopts shameful and shady business practices. In spite of the practice of Fire and Rehire receiving a lot of media attention, being condemned by ACAS, and the practice being specifically looked at by the Conservative government of the time, the company still chose to use the tactic to force staff on to new contracts. The company sacked many staff over this, shedding literally hundreds of years of expert product and ITSO experience within months of taking over the business. Sudden rounds of redundancies to get rid of more staff, targeted specifically at the ecebs business. There was absolutely no transparency in the redundancy process. When questioned about the justifications for the roles targeted, about the financial position of the company, about the potential cost savings from redundancies or analysis of the impact of shedding those roles, senior management flatly refused to answer. For a company that claims to take care of their people, it should be noted that the chairman was nowhere to be seen during this process, he was not involved at all, and did not issue any kind of statement to the staff at this point. Immediately following redundancies, a recruitment drive was started to take on new staff at ecebs. The culture of fear of fear and intimidation is real, as a single example, I have personally witnessed the CEO deriding and verbally attack a senior manager over their presenting style in an all hands meeting in front of all the company staff. Aggressive anti-union stance - the company, and in particular the CEO, Sean Dickinson, have been vocally opposed to union recognition, union activity and in employees having a meaningful say in their terms and conditions. They have stood in the way of the organisation and recognition attempts with wildly ridiculous arguments to avoid recognition. At the time of writing this is still ongoing, but the hearings with the CAC are public record, a search for “cac outcome prospect ecebs” should provide any prospective employees with some enlightening reading. Promises of a great place to work and flexibility are, at best, massively exaggerated. Hybrid working is given extremely grudgingly, the three day a week mandate is strictly enforced and monitored through door taps. Non-compliance is followed up through management lines directly from the CEO looking at weekly door tap data. Of the three days a week in office, one must be either a Monday or a Friday because the CEO doesn’t want “people having long weekends”. The atmosphere in the office is unpleasant, with a feeling that you are being constantly monitored, this is allegedly significantly worse in the Ferndown office where, if the several personal accounts I have heard are to be believed, Mr Dickinson’s presence is palpable. While a “dress code” was just one of the many strange things in the employee handbook when I left, my understanding is that this is now being enforced, with bans on t-shirts and a mandate for “sensible shoes”, I know that one of my old colleagues personally offended the CEO in summer last year for daring to wear shorts on a particularly warm day. The company is Haemorrhaging staff across all sites, over the last year the company has shed almost all of its specialist ITSO expertise. ITSO transport ticketing is a niche industry and not trivial, I watched as several people with true class leading expertise in the technology were sacked or alienated to the point of being effectively forced out the door. This is worrying for a company who’s core business is ITSO ticketing. The business is running on a skeleton technical team, most of the engineering team have been sacked or have left citing the toxic environment as one of their main considerations for moving on. In spite of suggesting that QA is a key focus, the business has shown no strategy for improving this. There is no real QA leadership and limited automation expertise. QA on most products is close to non-existent, and the products are plagued with bugs. QA Leads are on a revolving door, realising what they are dealing with, being immediately blamed for software quality issues, given no scope to make any meaningful changes and leaving the company ready for the next poor sucker to be sold the lie.